Brian’s Reflection: Saturday, October 20, 2007


I saw that all beings are fated to happiness:
action is not life, but a way of wasting some
force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness
of the brain.

- Arthur Rimbaud, French poet, born on
this day, 1854


Ah yes, yes! How we avoid happiness, we human beings. Sounds crazy, right? But it’s true, I perceive. Forever setting up barriers to being happy. We are taught, or we teach ourselves, to believe that “action” will bring us happiness, spending huge amounts of energy trying to manipulate the World and others (and often our inner selves). Delusion, or, to put it in the words of the Hebrew Scriptures, “a chasing after wind”.

But I think Rimbaud really hits the nail on the head with “Morality is the weakness of the brain.” Think of what we have done to each other in the human race under the guise of morality! I have an archetype in my mind of how the human perversion of morality works. Remember that scene of the judge, in Harold and Maude, fulminating about the fact that Harold (age 18 or so) and Maude (age 80 or so) might have made love? That fat, red, flushed, slavering visage of disgust? Completely failing to see the happiness of love at any age, wanting to regulate and control and forbid. How we use so-called morality as a way of shielding ourselves, in fear, from the happiness of caring, loving relationships. And in doing so, create vast legions of emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually warped human beings.

I side with Rimbaud’s insight. We are, by nature, “fated to happiness”.

God has gifted us. We reject the gift at our peril.

Brian+